A transfer of funds can lag a business transaction, such as a purchase, by many days if a check or other negotiable instrument is used. This is because routing and payment information must be read and processed, and the document must be transferred to a bank for funds to be exchanged. It is advantageous to companies or institutions accepting checks as a form of payment to process those checks as soon as possible after a transaction occurs, so that those companies can obtain and use the funds related to that transaction. There is therefore an increasing desire to place check processing systems at places of business, thereby allowing the business to digitize the information on the check. This eliminates the requirement that the business send the physical check to the source bank or other financial institution prior to getting paid, reducing transport delays. The drive to ‘truncation’, or reduction in transport time, has been accelerated by legislative measures in the United States and other nations. For example, the U.S. Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act 2003 (HR 1474 S1334), or ‘The Check 21 Act’, which went into effect in October 2004, enacted legal frameworks and standards for the electronic interchange of digital facsimiles of original financial instruments within the U.S.
Check processing systems operating in accordance with the Check 21 Act are typically required to read the routing information printed on a check and scan an image of the front side of the check or other negotiable instrument. Routing information is typically captured by reading characters printed on the check with a magnetic ink character reader, and images are typically captured using an image scanner. These two operations generally are performed on a document as the document is passed through a document processor, at a predefined speed, past a stationary magnetic ink character reader and image scanner.
Additionally, certain check processing systems developed for use under the Check 21 Act are intended to be small and low-cost, to encourage their use and adoption by businesses. However, these check processing systems can also be relatively low speed, due to the lower volume of checks processed at a business as compared to the number of checks processed at a financial institution. For example, a rate of 2-3 checks per minute would be unacceptable at a financial institution, but may be more than sufficient for a business.
Magnetic ink character reading reliability improves with increased rate of movement of a document through a document processor. Generally, at least a certain baseline speed (typically 5-10 inches per second) is required. As this rate of movement increases, an image scanner must be able to scan at the rate at which documents are passed through the document processor (i.e. with the image scanner and the magnetic ink character reader operating concurrently). For this and other reasons, existing check processing systems require use of a costly image scanner component, so that image scanning can be performed at a speed sufficient for reliable concurrent magnetic ink character reading. The cost of the image scanner is proportional to the speed of that image scanner, and represents a large portion of the overall cost of a document processor.
For these and other reasons, improvements are desirable.